1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a display apparatus adopted to all kinds of portable communication terminals, including a cellular phone, a digital phone, a personal digital assistant (PDA), a hand-held phone and a notebook computer, and a data display method using the same, and in particular, to a portable terminal capable of displaying data considering a rotating direction of a display module, and a data displaying method using the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, a portable terminal refers to a portable apparatus capable of providing a radio communication service to a user through radio communication with a base station. Such portable terminals have been generalized to people of all ages and both sexes all over the world, and are becoming necessities of life. The portable terminal essentially includes a mouthpiece/earpiece unit for exchanging audio signals with the other party, a data input/output unit, and an antenna device.
In the past, the portable terminal was simply used for a voice call. However, with the development of a communication technology, an improved portable terminal can transmit and receive text messages, and support a chatting function, a game function, etc. In addition, the improved portable terminal can access the Internet, and adopts a color LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) module instead of a black and white LCD module.
Typically, a microphone is used as a mouthpiece unit, and a speaker is used as an earpiece unit. In addition, keypad, touch screen and voice recognition device are used as data input units, and an LCD module is used as a data output unit.
A general LCD module displays input data so that a user can visually perceive the displayed data. The latest high-performance LCD module visually displays various data, such as text, graphics, animations, icons, still pictures and moving pictures, on its standardized screen, so that the user can perceive the displayed information.
However, the LCD modules that are utilized to provide screens for a portable terminal form screens having different widths and different lengths. Therefore, data and other information is displayed to a user on a standard size screen that is provided with a particular portable terminal model. In addition, the user, although he or she wishes to see the data on a wide screen, can only see the information displayed on the LCD module in a normal direction, since width and length are fixed in accordance with the size of the standard screen. For example, if a display module of the portable terminal is rotated, e.g. by about 90° or 180°, the displayed data is also rotated by the same degree. Therefore, the user has a difficulty in seeing the displayed data.